In a recent video-lecture for his online school Seminário de Filosofia, the Brazilian right’s favorite philosopher, Ovalo de Carvalho, recounted the conspiracy theory that the German sociologist Theodor Adorno wrote all the music and lyrics for the Beatles. Over the years, Carvalho has gained notoriety as a purveyor of surreal conspiracy theories, including the allegation that Pepsi uses the cells of aborted fetuses as a sweetener.
His latest theory asserts the Beatles could not have written their own songs, because they “were semi-literate in music” and “barely knew how to play the guitar.” Instead it was Adorno, a composer trained by Alban Berg and skilled in twelve-tone technique, who masterminded the Lennon-McCartney songbook.
Carvalho’s remarks will baffle fans of Adorno and the Beatles alike. Adorno, a major figure in the left-leaning intellectual movement known as the “Frankfurt School,” was a fervent critic of the commercialization and commodification of culture. Notoriously, he dismissed jazz and other types of popular music as “mechanical” and “standardized.”
Yet Carvalho’s assertions are not new: similar claims have been circulating on the far right since the late 1970s. The idea that Adorno was the secret songwriter for the Beatles is a byproduct of an antisemitic conspiracy theory, known as “Cultural Marxism,” that the main members of the Frankfurt School emigrated to the United States in the 1930s in order to implant political correctness, multiculturalism, and feminism into American culture.
In the US, right-wing activists, such as the late Paul Weyrich and Patrick Buchanan, deplored the growing influence of “Cultural Marxism.” In the early 2000s, Carvalho imported this conspiracy theory to Brazil, where it has become an ideological cornerstone of President Jair Bolsonaro’s right-wing administration. For example, Bolsonaro’s foreign minister Ernesto Araújo insists that climate change is a hoax orchestrated by “Cultural Marxists.”
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The Beatles have long attracted critics on the right. In 1965, Reverend David A. Noebel wrote Communism, Hypnosis, and the Beatles to warn the American public that “the minds of our little ones are being tampered with by the most cunning diabolical conspiracy in the annals of human history.” In this pamphlet, Noebel announced that the communists planned to use pop music to induce “menticide” in teenagers, causing them to lose their minds.
Noebel argued that the experiments of Russian psychologist Ivan Pavlov were the template for “Beatlemania.” In Pavlov’s most famous experiment, he fed a dog and rang a bell at the same time to train the dog to associate food with the sound of ringing. Over time, the dog salivated when it heard the bell ring, even when there was no food.
According to Noebel, this was a version of what the Beatles were doing to American teenagers. The hypnotic tempos of the Beatles’ music were calculated to inspire outbursts of hysterical ecstasy and lust in their female fans. Noebel argued that the overarching purpose of this Beatlemania was the elimination of American democracy and Christian morality.
In the following years, various figures across the ideological spectrum resorted to conspiracy theories to rationalize the seismic impact of the counterculture in 1960s America. Like Noebel, many conspiracy theorists blamed the Beatles for the political and cultural transformations they disliked. Adorno first appeared in this anti-Beatles conspiracy literature in the late 1970s, thanks to the work of Trotskyist-turned-fascist political cult leader Lyndon LaRouche.
LaRouche commissioned a 100-member research team from his political party — the U.S. Labor Party — to document the involvement of the British Royal Family in the global drug trade. In 1978, he published the results of their inquiry, Dope, Inc.: Britain’s Opium War Against the U.S, which identified both Adorno and the Beatles as participants in a shadowy British plot to disorient the youth of America.
According to Dope, Inc., the British Royal Family weaponized the music of the Beatles to promote drug consumption in America. Yet the Fab Four would never have succeeded without the musicological theories of Adorno, a British secret agent. LaRouche and his acolytes distort a quote from Adorno’s 1962 study Introduction to the Sociology of Music to insinuate that he wanted Americans to become hopelessly addicted to pop music.
Although LaRouche never fulfilled his political ambitions — he ran for President in every American election from 1976 until 2004 — his claims about Adorno and the Beatles took root in conspiracist circles. In 1992, the conspiracy theorist and supposed former intelligence officer John Coleman took the strange theories of Dope, Inc. and made them even stranger. Coleman’s book The Conspirator’s Hierarchy: The Committee of 300 alleged that European aristocrats and industrialists founded a secret society — the Committee of 300 — in 1901 that aimed to dominate and control the world. According to Coleman, the Committee of 300 enlisted Adorno to compose pop music that would encourage teenagers to defy their parents and overturn the status quo.
Coleman claimed that Hitler exiled Adorno from Germany for his subversive musical experiments. During his exile, Adorno allegedly worked for the British Royal Family at Gordonstoun School, where he invented the genre of “Beatlemusic Rock.” According to Coleman, the Committee of 300 decided in the 1960s to unleash Adorno’s Beatlemusic Rock on the world. Coleman asserted that Adorno’s songs for the Beatles were such a success that the Committee also asked him to write lyrics and music for other rock groups. He speculated that the Rolling Stones also recorded and performed Adorno’s music. Ultimately, the Committee of 300 recruited the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and other unspecified rock groups to perform Adorno’s “fiendish Satanic music” and promote marijuana use.
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LaRouche and Coleman’s wild claims about Adorno and the Beatles have since found a home in Bolsonaro’s Brazil. Carvalho’s video lectures are popular with Brazilians who fear that they are in danger of losing their country to an ungodly rabble of leftist radicals, queer folks, and globalist elites. The costly online courses on Seminário de Filosofia promise to supply viewers with the knowledge to resist and reverse the supposed degeneracy of modern Brazil. Like other illiberal ideologues around the globe, Carvalho claims to expose the lies of the left-wing “university establishment,” and denounces any displeasing historical event or figure as part of an insidious conspiracy. Moreover, students of his online counter-academy interpret any attempt to debunk Carvalho’s pronouncements as further proof of the so-called university establishment’s biased nature.
In this way, the “Adorno-As-Fifth-Beatle” theory sucks its devotees into a vortex of alternative history, in which secretive and omnipotent conspirators brainwash the masses with “I Want to Hold Your Hand” and “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da.”
As for the brainwashed masses: on Twitter, some Brazilians now speculate that Adorno must have written the long-lost Beatles masterpiece “Kant Buy Me Love.”
Andrew Woods is a PhD candidate at the Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism at Western University, and a Doctoral Fellow at the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right.
LMAO you sound like a fucking cultural Marxist.
Why on earth should such Carvalho rubbish be Mentoren at all?
Hopefully Andrew will figure it out…then again, he may already know it to be true.
Its all true. Andrews works for the same left wing Cultural Marxists as well and the Tavistock Institute which is the culmination of the Frankfurt School and ‘ critical theory’. We’ve been around long enough to know what these lefties/Jesuits are up to which is the destruction of the white Protestant Anglo Saxon society.
I ’m proud of how far you have come and for noway giving up.
The theory is mostly true, if you trace the timeline of the Beatles activities, they had NO TIME to write the songs. Plus, George Martin and newspapers spilled the beans on this back in the 1960’s.
Even if the Beatles didn’t write their songs, that in no way proves it even links Adorno to them.
Your comments about “Dope, Inc.” (written by three associates of Lyndon LaRouche) are completely inaccurate and defamatory. Adorno is mentioned on page 373 to quote his comments that Pop/Rock music, like drugs, have a socializing effect on the listener. The authors seem to be in agreement with Adorno. There are absolutely no comments here there that Adorno was a British Secret agent or was working to disorient youth. It is amazing that you can read Adorno, but misread this text. Are you so zealous to brandish everyone you don’t like as a “anti-semitic conspiracy theorist” that you need to fabricate such untruth?
I worry that you may be reading an entirely different book. The authors describe Adorno as a “British agent” on pg 373. The linked footnote states that Adorno was brought into America to “program a mass ‘musical’ culture that would steadily degrade consumers.” It’s hard to interpret these statements as anything other than saying that Adorno was a British secret agent (a claim that reappears in various LaRouchite publications over the year ) and that he was working to make young people addicted to pop music. (In fact, I left out the author’s claim that punk rock was the “result” of Adorno’s theories of popular music).
Admittedly, I wrote this piece over five years ago and I don’t know whether I still agree with much of what it says. However, I don’t think that I can be accused of misreading the texts themselves.
I think you are reading WAY TOO MUCH into just one very ambiguous word “agent”. There is absolutely nothing in the book “Dope Inc” to that says Adorno was “part of a shadowy British plot.” The linked footnote #19 in the edition I am reading only shows the title of Adorno’s book “Introduction to the Sociology of Music (New York: Seabury Press, 1976).” I think everything you are attributing to Adorno right here, is probably from your reading of John Coleman, whose “Committee of 300” book is an enduring work of purely fictitious garbage conspiracy.
Perhaps you are right.
However, multiple other LaRouchite authors (such as Peter Wyer, who contributed research to the study, and is likely the source for the claims about Adorno) did state that Adorno was a British intelligence agent. So, it is not entirely unfair to interpret the use of the word “agent” in this way.
Additionally, I think it is fair to say that the authors assign a role to Adorno in the British plot to create a ‘drug-sex countercuture’. After all, they are referring to Adorno in the part of the book where they claim that “the British fostered the creation of the bestial rock and drug cult.”
Take a look at footnote 18. It may be clarifying.
I agree with your assessment of Coleman.
I will add that this piece was originally 2,200ish words, but it was cut quite drastically down to its current length. The tone of the final product was more flippant than I would prefer, and the argumentation is a bit too brisk. Unfortunately, I was pretty severely ill at the time and I approved of the edits without much thought. Looking back through my files, the longer draft was much more careful about the claims that you’re objecting to. Perhaps it’s a sign that too much editing can be a bad thing…
Andrew, If you still have the unedited draft, you should publish it. Not that it will convince the wet-brained rube contingent, but there are some people new to these topics–and to this narrative in particular–and some of them would benefit from as much detail as they can read.
It’s also worth noting the mounting emergence of Generational Amnesia as a phenomenon affecting the historical review of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. Not inherently troubling, the way Aliteracy is–many researchers on topics like these are mostly drawn by titillation, and confine their reading to glib online polemics rather than investigating primary sources and wider histories of the era.
Aliterate superficiality is always going to be a much more serious problem when it comes to developing mature interpretations of history. But Generational Amnesia needs to be noted, too, because everybody has some. My only access to understanding the Prohibition Era of the 1920s and early 30s is through reading historical accounts, for example. And there’s an ever-present tendency for anyone reviewing history to indulge in Presentism. Especially in the case of Social History.
In this case, there’s also a problem of musical illiteracy, and lack of knowledge of musical history, particularly the cultural transference and translation of black American jump blues into American rock n roll featuring white American artists–which was in turn eagerly adopted and adapted as a music genre by a small niche subculture of British teenagers in the late 1950s. The most talented of whom formed the now legendary bands of the British Invasion: the Rolling Stones, the Yardbirds, the Who, the Animals–and the Beatles.
You can’t just knock out peak-era Lennon-McCartney tunes by mocking them up in a think-tank, or even a joint effort between the two of them. Only a tin-eared old moldy fig could imagine that those melodies are so mundane–so “simple”–that anyone could write them, with the perfectly placed chord twists of their bridges, and their shifting moods. (Or one of the younger set, that doesn’t know what a melody is.) and the words fit the melodies too well to be grafted on by some outside lyricist. Much less Theodor Adorno, for crying out loud.
Speaking of Adorno, every time I read comments by the Frankfurt School-“Cultural Marxism” fanatics who claim that he was some sort of Archon of social degeneracy, it’s like they’re giving a clinic on How To Make An Author Wrong With Poor Reading Comprehension. Between the selected handful of out-of-context quotes lifted from Adorno’s writing and the demonization of the intepretations offered as summary conclusions, they’ve managed to make a public intellectual practically unknown outside of his academic niche, even in his own time, viewed mostly as a fusty and somewhat authoritarian (ironically) and disapproving traditionalist (however Left-leaning) modernist social critic, into (Jaws theme music here) a mastermind propagandist professionally focused on inciting mass revelry, Dope, nihilism, Satanism, etc….in order to fulfill a covert agenda of Global Socialist Totalitarianism. And it really is some doing, to get it that twisted.
The same people will probably find a way to twist this comment post into unrecognizability, too. They are not as smart as they think they are.
I think Adorno was chosen as The Only Logical Choice to demonize as the “Left Elite Intellectual” Mastermind of the 1960s Musical Descent Into Rock Anarchy because he had a reputation as a musicologist. Adorno had a concentration in European avant-garde classical music, particularly the 12-tone music of Arnold Schoenberg. That all sounds very sophisticated and high-level, like wow man he could really be the Beatles Ghostwriter–as long as you don’t realize that 12-tone music bears absolutely no resemblance to 99% of the output of the music of the Beatles. Adorno was almost completely ignorant of American jazz–which he neither liked or understood–much less the R&B, country music, and rock’n’roll of the 1950s that the Beatles drew on for their ^ inspiration.
Every once in a blue moon, a musician who really loves and respects the work of Lennon and McCartney lucks into writing a homage that’s as good as one of the originals. But some Brill Building wing at Tavistock, or Theodor Adorno? No way. Don’t be Plecostomus.
[ ^ I almost added the term “alchemical” there as a adjective, before discarding it. Because with the carny-mark contingent, one wrong word and next thing you know, you’re Mephistopheles…tedious ]
“You can’t just knock out peak-era Lennon-McCartney tunes by mocking them up in a think-tank, or even a joint effort between two of them.” Meaning Tavistock and the Frankfurt School, not Lennon and McCartney.
( In the original sentence found in the post above, I inadvertently inserted a “the” that doesn’t belong. )